The Work Around the Work

When I first got into film photography, I spent a lot of time learning about film photography.

I watched videos about Leica cameras, then videos about film stocks, then videos comparing those film stocks. I learned why some photographers rate Portra 400 at 320, and how to sequence photographs into a series.

I could explain all of this with surprising confidence.

I just wasn't taking many photographs.

This is one of the stranger traps of learning something new. The things surrounding a craft are often easier to become obsessed with than the craft itself.

The cameras. The books. The terminology. The routines of people who are already good at it.

All of that feels productive. And some of it is. But it also lets us experience the identity of doing something without accepting the risk of actually doing it.

I could feel like a photographer while sitting at home watching someone else take photographs.

The internet makes this unusually easy.

For every worthwhile craft, there is now another craft built around explaining it. We can spend more time watching people discuss writing than writing, more time studying how startups are built than building one, and more time perfecting systems for our lives than living them.

The advice is not necessarily wrong. That is what makes the trap difficult to notice.

We finish a twenty-minute video and feel smarter. We bookmark an essay and feel prepared. We buy a book and feel committed. Each action produces a small emotional reward, similar enough to progress that it can replace progress for a surprisingly long time.

But none of it requires confronting reality.

Reality begins when we take the photograph and discover that the composition does not work. When we write the essay and realize that the thought was clearer in our heads. When we build the product and find out that nobody wants it.

That is the work itself.

The hard part is rarely acquiring more information. It is exposing ourselves to feedback.

And feedback is uncomfortable because it threatens the people we imagined we might be. Before we take the photograph, we can still imagine that it would have been great. Before we publish the essay, we can still imagine that we are good writers. Preparation preserves possibility. Doing the work replaces possibility with evidence.

Sometimes the evidence is disappointing.

So we prepare a little longer.

The problem is that preparation has no natural endpoint. There will always be another book, another video, another person whose process seems worth studying.

There is, of course, an irony in writing an essay about this. It can become one more thing we read instead of making something ourselves.

The work around the work can continue forever.

Meanwhile, the work itself remains untouched.